This website could help more low-income kids go to college

Pell Abacus provides information that students can use to compare colleges

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By

JillianBerman

Reporter

The actual cost of college is a mystery to many families, but it’s particularly enigmatic for low-income students, who can’t afford the sticker price of many schools, but are often eligible for generous aid packages.

A new tool is trying to demystify the process for this demographic, with the hope that fewer students will be scared off from applying to college by the price advertised by each school.

The tool, which is on a website called Pell Abacus, launching Monday, asks students a few simple questions, including: “are you eligible for free or reduced lunch?” and then provides information based on the student’s answers that they can use to compare colleges.

Families can see the average loan payments for students who received Pell Grants — the federal money the government provides to low-income students to attend college — at each school, the share of students receiving Pell Grants at each school and other information to help them determine whether a college is a financial fit for their needs.

By offering low-income students a shortcut to understanding how much they’ll truly be paying for school, the hope is that the tool will boost application and enrollment for this group of students, said Abigail Seldin, the co-founder of the site.

“Pell Abacus is really intended to be an early awareness tool,” she said. “Our primary goal is not only to streamline the college search process for these underserved students, but also to empower them” with more information.

Choosing the correct school can be particularly important for this demographic because some schools are much better than others at serving low-income students. The difference in the share of Pell Grant recipients who graduate within six years of entering college can vary widely by school, according to a recent study from the Education Trust, an advocacy organization geared to helping low-income students and students of color.

Research indicates that low-income students may shy away from applying to schools they could ultimately afford because they’re scared away by the sticker price and aren’t aware that they’d be eligible for financial aid. The financial aid application process itself is daunting and may also discourage students from applying because it requires families to answer a long list of questions.

Experts have suggested that if students know they’ll be eligible for financial aid early on, they may be more likely to apply for it. The Obama administration recently announced it would start allowing students to apply for financial aid earlier in the college application process and sync up their family’s tax records, based in part on this logic.

Pell Abacus is an outgrowth of the site College Abacus, which Seldin and her co-founder launched in 2013 to help students compare the net price, or the cost of a college when you factor in loans and grants, at various schools.

Pell Abacus is one of the first tools to incorporate a trove of data released by the federal government earlier this month. Though government officials walked back an initial plan to rate schools based on criteria like average income, graduation rates, loan repayment and other factors, they published the data using a format that would allow third-party sites to easily incorporate the information in their tools and rankings.

One of the goals of providing the new information is to help populations often underserved in the college process, such as low-income, first generation and adult college students, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on a conference call with reporters announcing the tool earlier this month.

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